A lot of my closest friends have been following along on my private Twitter account with my career journey this year, but I can finally talk about it a bit more publicly. In February I decided that it was time to start pursuing my passions again and get back to working on my career in tech. My goal since December of 2011 has been to be a professional front-end web developer instead of just a hobbyist front-end web developer. To that end I spent a couple months of my unemployment trying to advance my skills at home independently. HTML and CSS have been in the bag since I was a teenager but I knew I needed to finally learn JavaScript and JQuery and build up a portfolio. Unfortunately, this wasn’t progressing as quickly as I had hoped, as the resources I was using to learn weren’t very great. In addition, I really needed a source of income, so I was spending a lot of time applying to anything I could find in order to pay the bills. After 5 months of unemployment I eventually got a job as an Office Manager at Viator, Inc and my career goals were put on hold.

I’m starting to find that my life’s journey of starting out as a hobbyist front-end coder to aspiring theatre actress to aspiring English major to Director of Operations at a non-profit organization to professional print designer to Computer Arts student to aspiring video editor to transitional user interface designer to project coordinator to aspiring professional front-end developer to aspiring full-stack web developer is actually a pretty common kind of transition.

It’s recently become very clear to me that the biggest immediate goal in my life right now is to get hired by a fun tech startup in the city. The search is both exciting and nerve-wrecking, much akin to dating. “Oh my gosh, what if no one wants me?” But like love, I’m sure that when it does fit for both the company and me, it will be glorious.